I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

Nov 7 (Reuters) – Tesla Motors Inc reported the third fire in its Model S luxury electric car in six weeks, this time after a highway accident in Tennessee, sending shares down 9 percent on Thursday.

The Tennessee Highway Patrol said the 2013 model sedan ran over a tow hitch that hit the undercarriage of the vehicle, causing an electrical fire on Interstate 24 on Wednesday. A highway patrol dispatcher called the damage to the car “extensive.”

The Model S undercarriage has armor plating that protects a battery pack of lithium-ion cells. Tesla said it did not yet know whether the fire involved the car’s battery.

Via Hot Air. I’m not going to be overly mean about this: after all, they paid off that half-billion buck low-interest loan that the government gave them. Early, even. While I have problems with the Obama administration subsidizing the start-up costs of what’s essentially a toy for rich Greenies, a contract’s a contract – and, again, they did pay the money back ahead of time. Still. Karma. It’s what’s for dinner.

They’re supposed to have armored bottoms but apparently they thought something light like aluminum would work just fine. Every one of the cars that has burst into flames had it’s “armored” bottom punctured. They need to start using something like steel I understand that will cause problems but it sure beats having your car burn up. They need to start engineering for the real world not the laboratory.

It may never be ready, and I rather resent subsidizing what I consider to be a waste of resources*. The mass/power ratios involved in aoutomobiles preclude building an electric rugged enough to long survive real world conditions.
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*The experimentation may yet yield some (probably tangential) technological breakthrough that will provide some ROI, but I rather doubt it.

Your * is only true, qixlqatl, if you assume current energy density in batteries is the best possible, eh?
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Adding alkaline materials improved carbon-cells, NiMH density definitely exceeds lead-acid, I think there’s a newer one that exceeds NiMH that’s into the cell phone market, and I’m sure there are a few others currently in laboratories.
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As for “subsidizing”, I don’t disagree with you but Tesla isn’t Fisker.
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Mew

Even if the subsidies don’t go directly to Tesla, they still artificially inflate the market… Meh, you’re probably right, but all the “green energy” boondoggles have pretty much soured me on the whole “sustainability” culture.
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Now, I’m neither a scientist nor an engineer, but I still think my assessment is correct about the mass/power ratio problem for electric vehicles. At the very least, I believe it is going to be a very long time before power storage systems are equal to the task of moving a reasonably rugged vehicle at a practical speed over a useful distance. I could easily be wrong about that: “Eureka” moments do happen. One thing I’m quite sure of is that all of the taxpayer dollars poured into it could have been much better spent…..
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You know what makes me think we’re a long way from driving ‘general purpose’ electrics? The military isn’t, to my knowledge, using anything of the sort, and that’s where the tech would most likely show up first.